Autism and Justified Anger

On my autism treatment and acceptance, Autisticook commented by saying that anger in an autistic is often justified. She compared it to the situation where a wheelchiar user gets angry because they are faced with yet another two-step staircase that wasn't necessary and where nobody thought of installing a ramp. This made me think: are we overpathologizing anger in people with developmental disabilities (and mental illness)? Are we incorrectly assuming that anger is part of the disorder, while it's just a response to a lack of accommodations? This is obviously not a scientific discussion, as what is a reasonable accommodation depends on your perspective.

I just a few days ago heard about cognitive accessibility, where people accommodate their language, for exxample, for understanding by people with learning difficulties. I'm trying to find an accessible and understandable explanation of this, but can't seem to find one. What I understan dit to mean, includes for example using simple, straightfoward language. With autistic people, you may need to refrain from using figures of speech, for example.

What if you were dropped in a country where you didn't speak the language and everyone refused to speak English? Would you get angry? Quite likely you would. Now understand autism as communicating in a different language, too. Is it strange then that the autistic gets angry when you routinely refuse to make an effort to speak their language?

Autism is not just a communication disability. It's in a way a sensory disability, too. Imagine, again, being in that foreign country and everyone shouting at you for whatever reason. They also randomly shine a flashlight at your eyes for whatever reason. In addition, this country is rich on insects, and they crawl over your body all the time. Would you get frustrated? Sure you would!

We do not medicate wheelchair users for getting frustrated at the umpteenth staircase. You would not want to be put on medication if you were in the aforementioed country. So why do we medicate autistics who are irritable? It's probably because accommodating them requires a radical paradigm shift in what we always thought access was all about. Is it a more radical shift than the shift towards wheelchiar accessibility? I am not sure.

Family Offered $86K to Take Son out of School, Waive Complaints of Abuse

I don't normally use trigger warnigns but this post sure requires one for graphic descriptions of abuse.

@mamabegood on Twitter just posted a news story that says that a family was offered $86K to keep their autistic son out of public school. That's what the title reads. The actual story is much worse and includes abuse at the hands of a teacher.

This story, unfortunately, is not an isolated case. Many children and adults with autism get abused by professionals in whose care they've been placed in one respect or another. The details of the abuse in thsi particular story remind me of a lot of "old-school" ABA therapy, where aversives were presumed to be the single most important factor in its success. David Swanson, the young autistic in this story, was force-fed by a teacher because he refused to eat with a metal rather than plastic fork due to oral sensitivity. Now imagine if I forced a sharp object into your mouth. This would sure be considered abuse. If you then vomited and I'd force you to eat your own vomit, that'd make the abuse even worse.

Honestly, even though this news report is generally okay, it's symptomatic of something I can't quite pin down that the most focus is put on the money offered to David's mother to take her son out of school. Is it that abuse of autistics is commonly excused because "they" (autistics) are difficult, aggressive maybe, hard-to-parent often, and many times won't meet up to the expectations of others? Please, if you've made it to this point in my post, let's join Mama Be Good on Facebook in a moment of silence. Thank you for reading.

Healing Quotes: Maya Angelou on Bitterness and Anger

"Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean." - Maya Angelou

I have always liked inspirational quotes, although I am getting a bit weary now that they're shared on Facebook all over the place without even as much as a personal commetn. I therefore want to write about thsi quote and express how it affects me.

Bitterness and anger are both emotions that come when something happens that we don't like and that we feel we don't deserve. But while bitterness is a passive emotion, one that gets people stuck in their feeling of beint treated unfairly, anger is an active emotion. It drives people to actually do something about the injustice done to them or about the consequences of this injustice. An example of this can be seen in Down with Dat's use of anger to fuel activism.

Anger really isn't the negative emotion we often think of, the emotion that paralyzes people into being consumed with self-pity. That is bitterness. Bitterness may actually also be like depression (not the clinical kind, but the everyday depression most people experience at times) rather than just anger, and, while we don't usually choose to be depressed, we can change our train of thought to convert it into anger and action.

Disability Hierarchies

Last week, K at Transcending CP wrote an interesitnb blog post on the "us" vs. "them" mentality non-disabled people have about people with disabilities. I commented and mentioned several ways the disabled themsleves have an "us" vs. "them" mentality towards other disabled people. Today, I want to expand on this by discussing disability hierarchies.

First, there is the hierarchy of severity of one particular disability. For example, at the school for the blind which I went to from fourth until sixth grade, the people with some vision had a lively competition of who could see best. We even used to introduce ourselves as "Johnny who has 20/400". I only actively competed in my first year at this particular school, because in fifthe grade, the partially sighted children (I was going to write "partials" here) and braille readers were merged and I was in a class with only one other braille reader with some vision, who avoided this competition it seemed.

Similarly, among autistic people there is a competition. If you go to Wrong Planet or another Aspie-dominated site, you'll see that most people there don't want to associate with "low-functioning" autistics. As a person who is only "high-functioning" in terms of IQ and who despises this hierarchy, I don't like this. It's like those with "low-functioning" autism have no right to the acceptance that the "high-functioning" want.

Then there are disability hierarchies that cross lines between different disabilities. An example is my having bullied an intellectually disabled child when I was at the aforementioned school for the blind. I apparently felt that intellectual disability made someone less of a worthwhile human being than visual impairment. I don't think I actually thought that deeply, but I did bully this girl because of her intellectul impairment. Adults with physical or sensory impairments do have the ability to actually think about this, and it is reflected in statements like "You may be able-bodied but I am able-minded".

Conversely, the more visible disabilities tend to be viewed as more "real"by some people than developmental or psychiatric disabilities. As a poignant aexample, my psychologist, when describing my disabilities, only mentioned my visual impairment and my slight motor deficits. Also, when I was still on the locked ward several years ago, there was a partially sighted, hard-of-hearing man on my ward who obviously also had severe mental illness. Because of his limited but existent sight and hearing, he was expected to do a few chores that I, being totally blind, was excused from. At one time, I heard a nurse tell him: "You may be twice-disabled, but you are not thrice-disabled."

For a long time, disabled people have been "them". The Black civil rights movement was grounded in the belief that Black people are just as capable as Whites. Then the blind and physically disabled and Deaf movements were grounded on the idea that people with sensory or physical disabilities are, with reasonable accommodations, just as capable as people without disabilities. Now people with developmental and psychiatric disabilities are demanding civil rights, an sometimes this si grounded on the same principles, hence creating a new "them" for those who don't meet the "just as capable" standard. It is my hope that, at one point, we can live without the "us" vs. "them" mentality, but this hope may be idle. After all, as a human race, are we truly evolved enough to recognize each of us as equal? And if we were, then animal rights activists would say that's still not good enough. Rights activism always demands a shift from "them" to "us" but will there ever not be "them"? And if so, will we survive?